Few years ago when we planned to launch an international symposium in Catania (Sicily, Italy) during September 1998 about the "Sustainability of chestnut forest ecosystems" in co-operation with the Working group 4 ("silviculture" led by F. Giudici and F. Romane) of the COST Action G 4 ("Multidisciplinary chestnut research"; responsible for E. Wilhelm). We did not realised how the task was perilous. But we already were warned about the difficulty of this challenge through two contracts with the European Union including about 15 teams around the Mediterranean Basin dealing with this theme. Thus, the objective of this symposium was to "synthesise" our results from the "sustainability" point of view. This symposium clearly showed we did not reached our target, even each presentation and its discussion were interesting and fruitful by itself. To illustrate, that we only present shortly in this introduction-like part, the totally opposed opinions of the key-note speakers: (i) Ciancio & Nocentini discussed the concept of sustainable forest management but (ii) Conversely, and perhaps provocatively, di Castri "demonstrated" that the concept of sustainable management could not exist. We also added, to be more optimistic, (iii) some proposals and comments of a group of scientists and managers that try to introduce in concrete terms this concept in the chestnut  ecosystems management (Giudici, Amorini, Manetti, Chatziphilippidis, Pividori, Sevrin & Zingg). These three parts, also give to us the opportunity, particularly in the third part, to propose some general information about the chestnut in Europe as well as some definitions. These remarks press us to adopt the point of view of Shearman (1990) which attempt "to show that is not sustainability that requires definition or clarification, but rather its implications for any given context which it is applied" (Romane & Houssard, 1995).